How Open Source Makes SAP More Manageable

SAP continues to help drive the digital transformation of tens of thousands of companies of all sizes and sectors. In fact, SAP software touches nearly every aspect of how modern businesses are run. And with continued improvements to the platform, SAP is helping businesses to constantly move forward, to make them more capable, powerful, and agile.

SAP choosing to run SAP HANA on Linux makes this forward motion possible. In fact, SAP has placed open source development on the same level as its own software. By doing this, SAP has made it possible for SUSE to develop a number of tools around SAP HANA. Thanks to these open source tools, along with SUSE solutions focused on meeting infrastructure needs and supporting SAP S4/HANA applications, the platform has become easier to configure, deploy, and manage, making it more available.

Although SAP provides its own tools for availability, security, and management, there’s a wealth of enterprise-class open source software available from SUSE – software that can extend, augment, and deepen the built-in functionality of SAP S/4HANA.

IDC recently released a white paper, titled “Open Source Automation and Monitoring Makes SAP Much More Manageable in the Cloud and On-Premises,” which gives some insight into how SAP S/4HANA has benefited from SUSE and how that can ease your SAP operations. Let’s take a look at what this paper covers. Feel free to click the hyperlink above to get a copy of the full report.

Adding Value to SAP Infrastructures

The IDC whitepaper starts with an overview of the products and solutions that are part of the SUSE portfolio for SAP infrastructures. This includes SUSE Enterprise Linux Server for SAP Applications for which there are four key areas that combine to make up the product:

• The operating system
• The SUSE Linux Enterprise High Availability Extension
• SAP-specific tools
• Product support

Other solution elements from the SUSE portfolio include:

• SUSE Manager: This tool makes it easy for administrators to use automation for deployment, compliance, and system set up/patching.
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Live Patching: This solution makes it possible to apply patches to the Linux kernel without having to reboot the system (for up to one year).

The IDC whitepaper outlines a SUSE roadmap, focused on cloud deployments, new processor support, and persistent memory technology, all of which will go a long way to improve performance, reliability, and uptime.

SAP, SUSE, and the Cloud

SUSE customers are increasingly migrating their workloads to the public cloud, which is where we believe future growth will be focused. This is in perfect alignment with SAP nudging its customers to SAP S/4HANA in the cloud. This is why SUSE is focused on customer needs for cloud deployments, with a concentration on deployment automation and monitoring.

SUSE supports a variety of High Availability scenarios for SAP NetWeaver, SAP HANA, and SAP S/4HANA in the cloud. The IDC paper lists the specific scenarios for cloud and on-premise implementations.

Simplifying End-to-End Deployments

SUSE is making end-to-end deployments of SAP on public cloud hosting simple, reliable, and consistent with on-premise implementations. This makes it easier to run SAP deployments in a hybrid cloud setup. With a configuration management system that makes it easier to manage high-speed communication with a large number of systems in a highly scalable environment, SUSE enables customized, modular end-to-end automation of SAP S/4HANA implementations.

This automation can work in various phases of the end-to-end automation, such as:

• Single-node HANA installation
• Pacemaker set up
• NetWeaver installation

To make this possible, SUSE provides scripts to create SAP environments on major public cloud service providers (including AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud) to then deploy, via automation, SAP workloads. With these scripts, end users can migrate their SAP workloads between SAP deployments on public cloud platforms. To make this even more flexible, the deployment automation capability can provide a consistent deployment approach for both on-premises and cloud implementations.

Even better, this entire process can be managed through the SUSE Manager web-based interface, where you can choose any/all steps required, using pre-built deployment configurations.

Once you’ve deployed SAP S/4HANA using SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications, you’ll have powerful monitoring tools at your disposal. Adding SUSE Manager (or other solution for graphical display), you’ll have tools for monitoring, alerting, and visualization to manage both on-premise and cloud deployments. These tools will allow admins to monitor (at various granularities) operating systems, clusters, and even the database.

The Outlook Is Open

The convergence of SAP S/4HANA and open source solutions from SUSE not only make it possible for more companies to deploy this game-changing platform, but to do so with much more efficiency, flexibility, and ease.

If you’ve been hesitant to make the move to the latest iteration of SAP S/4HANA, SUSE’s application of open source technologies to SAP infrastructures make this the perfect time to make that transition. To learn more, download the IDC whitepaper.